Dito Montiel is the one-time punk-rocker who made his name by directing A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, an intelligent film adapted from his own memoir of growing up in hardscrabble 1980s New York. What, we are entitled to wonder, is he doing on board this most generic of films: the story of a street-smart hustler sucked into an illegal subculture of extreme bare-knuckle brawling. Whatever the reason, Fighting has emerged a fascinating, though hardly flawless, hybrid. On the surface, it's as dumb as The Fast and the Furious, with a cookie-cutter story arc in which Shawn (Channing Tatum), a musclebound but useless knock-off hawker, is spotted by pavement entrepreneur Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard) and hauled into the streetfighting scene; there to take on one opponent after another for increasingly lucrative pay-offs. Real gawd-help-us video-game stuff.

However Montiel, and his writing partner Robert Munic, have managed to elevate this pedestrian material by suffusing it with a sensitivity for place and character that rarely gets anywhere this sort of thing. That's not to say Fighting isn't violent - often obnoxiously so. Montiel doesn't stint on the skull crunches and back slams; presumably this is the film's raison d'être. But slipped in between the set pieces, Montiel has created some unexpected delights; a number of remarkably tender love scenes, for example, in which Shawn clumsily woos his dream girl, club waitress Zulay (Zulay Henao). There's also a properly funny cameo from Altagracia Guzman, playing Zulay's zealously protective aunt.

More than anything, though, it's the way the central characters don't cleave to conventional templates: Shawn is an ultra-polite southern boy, and manager/promoter Harvey is laid-back to the point of horizontality. In fact, Terrence Howard steals the movie - as a most considerate example of hustlerdom, exuding a shambling charm that reminded me of Benicio del Toro. You couldn't call Fighting great - at its core it is simply too cruddy - but Montiel has managed to inject it with the smell and feel of the streets that he clearly once knew well.